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The anxiety leading up to this week’s NATO summit is unusually intense, thanks in large part to President Trump’s fractious relationship with European allies. Trump’s political values are often in tension with that of his transatlantic counterparts, and the White House is inching ever closer to an all-out trade war with Europe and Canada, but the real drama of the NATO summit will center on Trump’s brash accusations of allied free-riding. He recently sent letters to many European capitals berating them for not meeting their pledge to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense.

In a post at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Lucie Béraud-Sudreau and Nick Childs try to push back on the notion that providing for European defense is all that costly for the United States. While it is true that the $602.8 billion the United States spent on its military in 2017 “was the equivalent of 70.1% of aggregate spending by all NATO member states,” this exaggerates the true cost, they argue.

Direct U.S. spending on European defense, by their estimate, is only about $30.7 billion in 2017 and $36 billion in 2018, or between 5.1% and 5.5% of the total U.S. defense budget.

How do they calculate this number? They tally up the cost of three things: (1) direct funding for NATO, including common procurements; (2) the costs of the U.S. military presence in Europe; and (3) U.S. foreign military assistance.

Now, $30-$40 billion every year is nothing to sniff at. That is an enormous chunk of change for an America that is $21 trillion in debt to be spending on the defense of a region that is remarkably rich, powerful, and safe.

The problem, however, is that this understates the true cost of America’s NATO commitments. It is misleading to count the U.S. contribution to NATO solely as a sum of direct annual costs. The tally should also account for the indirect cost of maintaining a military big enough to fulfill our security commitments in Europe. It must account for some share of the permanent force structure that would shift to the reserves, or disappear entirely, if the United States wasn’t pledged to treating an attack on Paris, France or Podgorica, Montenegro as synonymous with attacks on Paris, Texas, or Portland, Maine. This more inclusive count is very difficult if not impossible to calculate with precision, but it is more honest.

In a December 28, 2017 column for the Washington Post entitled, “Opioid Abuse in the US Is So Bad It’s Lowering Life Expectancy. Why Hasn’t the Epidemic Hit Other Countries?,” Amanda Erickson succumbs to the false narrative that misdiagnoses the opioid overdose crisis as being primarily a manifestation of doctors over-prescribing opioids, goaded on by greedy, unethical pharmaceutical companies. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health revealed less than 25% of people using opioids for non-medical reasons get them through a prescription. A study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association found just 13% of overdose victims had chronic pain conditions. MultipleCochrane analyses show a true addiction (not just dependency) rate of roughly 1% in chronic pain patients on long-term opioids. Yet despite the 41% reduction in the prescription of high-dose opioids since 2010, the overdose rate continues to climb, and for the past few years heroin and fentanyl have been the major causes of death, as death from prescription opioids has stabilized or receded.

In actual fact, the rise in drug abuse and overdose is multifactorial, with socioeconomic and socioculturalcomponents. This helps explain the Washington University study reporting 33% of heroin addicts entering rehab in 2015 started with heroin, as opposed to 8.7% in 2005.

It also helps explain why, contrary to Ms. Erickson’s reporting, opioid overdoses have reached crisis levels in Europe, despite a European medical culture that historically has been stingy with pain medicines, and has encouraged stoicism from patients. And the overdose crisis in Canada, ranked second in the world for per capita opioid use, has alarmed public health authorities there. But at least the Europeans and Canadians have the good sense to emphasize harm reduction measures to address the crisis, such as safe injection rooms and medication-assisted treatment, rather than focusing on inhibiting doctors from helping their patients in pain.

Recentterrorist attacks in Europe have increased death tolls and boosted fears on both sides of the Atlantic. Last year, I used common risk analysis methods to measure the annual chance of being murdered in an attack committed on U.S. soil by foreign-born terrorists. This blog is a back of the envelope estimate of the annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack in Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack in the United States from 2001 to 2017 is about 1 in 1.6 million per year. Over the same period, the chances are much lower in European countries.

Methods and Sources

Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom are included because they have suffered some of the largest terrorist attacks in Europe in recent years. Sweden and Germany are included because they have each allowed in large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers who could theoretically be terrorism risks.

The main sources of data are the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland for the years of 1975 to 2015, with the exception of 1993. I used the RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism to fill in the year 1993. I have not compiled the identities of the attackers, any other information about them, or the number of convictions for planning attacks in Europe. The perpetrators are excluded from the fatalities where possible. Those databases do not yet include the years 2016 and 2017, so I relied on Bloomberg and Wikipedia to supply a rough estimate of the number of fatalities in terrorist attacks in each country in those two years through June 20, 2017. The United Nations Population Division provided the population estimates for each country per year.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly complained that the United States carries too much of the economic and military burden in NATO. He has even gone so far as to call the European alliance “obsolete” and to suggest that his administration might not fulfill the treaty’s Article 5 obligation that commits NATO countries to come to the defense of any member that is attacked (Note: administration officials have repeatedly sought to reassure NATO allies that we remain committed to the collective defense of Europe, and Trump has contradicted himself on this score).

Many think this provocative rhetoric is just a ploy to get our NATO allies, who habitually underspend on defense and free-ride on America’s security guarantees, to pay more of their fair share of the burden. At the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, Andrea Gilli argues this approach is unlikely to jolt NATO allies into spending more on defense, though. Among other reasons, most NATO allies “face financial and political constraints to increasing military expenditure” in part because U.S. security assurances “have freed up state funds in Europe for other priorities, including a robust system of social services.” And since cutting welfare benefits is typically a political non-starter, we shouldn’t necessarily expect NATO countries to boost defense spending due to Trump’s abrasive rhetoric.

But the historical record seems to contradict Gilli’s argument. According to the RAND Corporation, Europe has historically spent between 43 percent and 78 percent of U.S. spending on defense. The ratio reached its peak in 1980, and then again in 2000 - years that were at the tail end of periods of defense budget cuts. And according to the RAND report, one of the the most successful techniques in getting NATO allies to share more of the burden was “threats by Congress to withdraw its troops from Europe.”

The only period of signficant real growth in European defense spending was during the 1970s; otherwise European defense expenditure has been remarkably flat in real terms…

Historically, efforts to create incentives or to manage the burden-sharing problem have taken four different approaches. The first approach (1966 to the mid-1980s) was based on the threat of U.S. troop withdrawals. With a series of resolutions and amendments from 1966 to 1975, Senator Mike Mansfield sought to use the threat of U.S. troop withdrawals to force Europe to contribute more and to lessen U.S. costs. As noted, that effort—plus other factors relating to economic growth and the Soviet threat—may have had a positive effect: European defense spending grew by 44 percent between 1970 and 1984.

Certainly other factors contributed to this period of growth in NATO burden sharing - higher rates of economic growth, increased perceptions of the Soviet threat, defense budget cuts as we withdrew from Vietnam, etc. But U.S. threats to pare back its commitment to the region seem to have had a significant impact.

That said, European defense spending may never reach the levels that the Trump administration, or for that matter the Washington foreign policy community generally, would prefer. And while U.S. security guarantees are surely one reason for this, it also may be the case that European countries aren’t boosting defense spending levels because they don’t face any major threats. Increasing defense spending to 2 percent of GDP or higher won’t do much about the terrorism problem European countries face. And the supposed geopolitical threat from Russia, meddling in Georgia and Ukraine aside, is consistently exaggerated.

Muslim immigrant assimilation in the United States is proceeding well. American Muslims have either similar or greater socio-economic status and levels of education than the average American. They are also active in civil and political society. However, this is not the case in Europe where Muslim immigrants tend to have worse labor market outcomes, are less well educated, and less socially integrated. The lack of assimilation and integration in Europe is affected by policies regarding multiculturalism, welfare, labor market regulation, citizenship, and guest worker laws that make integration more costly.

Integration in Europe

Social opinions show how Muslims in Europe are less integrated than in the United States. In Europe, there is a wide gap between Muslim and non-Muslim acceptance of homosexuality (Figure 1) and abortion (Figure 2) according to three surveys published in 2007and2009. The acceptance gap on these issues is the smallest in the United States – meaning that Muslims in the United States have opinions that are closer to the general public than in European countries (Figure 3).

Figure 1

Is Homosexuality Morally Acceptable?

Sources: Pew and Gallup.

Figure 2

Is Abortion Morally Acceptable?

Sources: Pew and Gallup.

Figure 3

Acceptance Gap

Sources: Pew and Gallup.

Opinions on social issues are just one aspect of this gap in assimilation but an important one for judging how assimilated immigrants are into Western culture. Although there are many other areas that could be compared, opinions of abortion and homosexuality show that Muslim Europeans are less well-assimilated than Muslims in the United States.

On the plus side, I admire corporations that efficiently and effectively compete by producing valuable goods and services for consumers, and I aggressively defend those firms from politicians who want to impose harmful and destructive forms of taxes, regulation, and intervention.

On the minus side, I am disgusted by corporations that get in bed with politicians to push policies that undermine competition and free markets, and I strongly oppose all forms of cronyism and coercion that give big firms unearned and undeserved wealth.

With this in mind, let’s look at two controversies from the field of corporate taxation, both involving the European Commission (the EC is the Brussels-based bureaucracy that is akin to an executive branch for the European Union).

First, there’s a big fight going on between the U.S. Treasury Department and the EC. As reported by Bloomberg, it’s a battle over whether European governments should be able to impose higher tax burdens on American-domiciled multinationals.

The U.S. is stepping up its effort to convince the European Commission to refrain from hitting Apple Inc. and other companies with demands for possibly billions of euros… In a white paper released Wednesday, the Treasury Department in Washington said the Brussels-based commission is taking on the role of a “supra-national tax authority” that has the scope to threaten global tax reform deals. …The commission has initiated investigations into tax rulings that Apple, Starbucks Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV. received in separate EU nations. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew has written previously that the investigations appear “to be targeting U.S. companies disproportionately.” The commission’s spokesman said Wednesday that EU law “applies to all companies operating in Europe – there is no bias against U.S. companies.”